[cmaury]

You're absolutely right that changing motivations from intrinsic to an extrinsic can have negative affects. I'm pretty sure there is a study that people paid a dollar to complete a crossword or some other word puzzle did worse than people who were asked to do it for no pay.

However, I think there are cases where extrinsic motivation can be beneficial. This campaign provides a good example.

Those with the programming skills necessary to jailbreak the iPhone may not be as intrinsically motivated to do so as the OS matures, and so they stop dedicated time. But these engineers are by no means the only people who might benefit from jailbreaking.

The disabled community is one such group. They, in general, may not have the skills necessary to write the software necessary to jailbreak their devices, but could benefit greatly if such software existed. Offering a bounty is a way for them to cross that skill gap.

These campaigns aren't meant for the benefit of software developers. They are for the benefit of those who have great ideas, but lack the skills to fulfill them.

Extrinsic motivation may not be the ideal condition, but that does not mean it is something that should be avoided.

[saurik]

To the extent to which I believe these are interesting arguments to have, I think that this should be discussed only after the intrinsic motivation has failed; as it stands, it is my understanding that a jailbreak is coming from evad3rs in the near future: planetbeing has already stated that they have what they need, and they are just working on integration and support for all devices (which is a lot of busywork). As for getting paid, they actually do get a good number of after-the-fact donations, but that is a drastically different kind of expectation from the users giving the donations, as well as a drastically different kind of mentality that goes behind the developer (as even if all you cared about was money, you aren't shopping for large sums ahead-of-time).

[starkness]

To our knowledge, no one was working on an open source jailbreak, and given that the site I'm building is designed to incentivize things like free and open source software, this was a huge component. I've also been told there are a good number of people that have jailbreaks, and it's possible that they might be motivated to release it as FOSS if enough funds are raised.

And it's not like anything is keeping evad3rs from getting donations if they release a closed source jailbreak, or even if they or anyone else releases a FOSS one and claims the prize (in fact with other related campaigns, lots of donations came in after the fact).

[saurik]

> To our knowledge, no one was working on an open source jailbreak...

(responded to elsewhere, maybe with more emphasis on openjailbreak.org)

> ...and given that the site I'm building is designed to incentivize things like free and open source software, this was a huge component. I've also been told there are a good number of people that have jailbreaks, and it's possible that they might be motivated to release it as FOSS if enough funds are raised.

I believe my response to this notion (when it was brought up by the other person who contacted me about your bounty a few weeks ago) was that you would be better off then attempting to do this for a later version of iOS, as the kinds of numbers that had been thrown around as "the magic number" to make that happen was hundreds of thousands of dollars... it will take a lot of time and a lot of really hungry users that don't see jailbreaks (open or closed) on the horizon, to generate that kind of money. Releasing this now kind of calls that goal into question: that goal incentivizes waiting.